2000 Volume 116 Issue 4 Pages 313-320
This report reviews recent production technologies for the extra heavy oil reserves such as Athabasca oil sands. The extra heavy oils (bitumen) in Canada and Venezuela represent a huge amount of recovery oil resources, about 300 billion barrels respectively. Recently, economical and technical conditions for operation and production of heavy oils have been turned for the better. More and more new projects for in situ production have been planed and some of them are on going using advanced well architecture such as horizontal wells technology and improved recovery methods. It is predicted that the amount of bitumen and synthetic oil productions will be quickly increased until 2005. For last ten years, the steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) method have been developed as an improved in situ production method at Alberta, Canada. It provides economic means to produce a part of the huge reserves of Athabasca oil sands. This report also focuses on the recent SAGD projects including the Japan Canada Oil Sands (JACOS) Project and introduces author's experimental studies.
